As a teenager in the Czech Republic, Lenka Zdeborová glimpsed her future in an Isaac Asimov novel. A character in Asimov’s “Foundation” series invents a mathematical method for predicting the path of an entire civilization by averaging out the haphazard behavior of billions of individuals. The concept gave her a “mesmerizing feeling,” Zdeborová recalls — one that returned when she later... Source As a teenager in the Czech Republic, Lenka Zdeborová glimpsed her future in an Isa...

👋 You are reading Maker Stations — your Sunday newsletter, where we feature desk tours with makers and creators. Name: Guillaume Lemay Location: Montréal, Canada Occupation: Videographer & Editor Room size: 8 m² (86 ft²) Cost of setup: Around 10K CAD (~$7,4K) for all the tech, furniture and desk setup accessories Social media: Photography Instagram , Tech Instagram , TikTok Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself Hey! I’m a commercial photographer, videographer and editor from M...

Excuse the alarmist title, but I think it’s justified, as it’s an issue that’s caused me a ton of pain in both support emails and actually tracking it down, so I want to make others aware of it so they don’t similarly burned. Brief intro For the uninitiated, UserDefaults (née NSUserDefaults ) is the de facto iOS standard for persisting non-sensitive, non-massive data to “disk” (AKA offline). In other words, are you storing some user preferences, maybe your user’s favorite i...

Quick PSA for the very kind people who decided to support what I do over on Ko-Fi . I recently noticed that some memberships were getting stuck with a pending label even though they were working fine in the months before. Apparently, that’s caused by a bug—probably on the Ko-Fi side but still can’t say for sure—and if you were a supporter affected by this you probably didn’t even get an email notification from them. So your membership might have expired without you realising it. So ...

Hello, It's time to speak about more Gleba. Some changes, and also something new... The Gleba problems In the last few months we have been thinking about how to improve Gleba. There has always been this fundamental problem with a biological-oriented planet - other things you produce in the game tend to not be organic so it doesn't quite fit as easily as a planet based on making more Iron or more electronic circuits. It's difficult to integrate the biological producti...

You can now follow my articles on some non-questionable social networks that also  federate (interoperate): Flipboard , Mastodon and Bluesky . The hunt for water on the Moon continues Aggregated solar illumination map of the Moon’s south pole made from stacked observations by NASA’s LRO spacecraft. The brightest spots are topographic highs that are maximally sunlit whereas the pitch black areas are permanently shadowed—within which water ice deposits are thought to exist. Image: NAS...

Ok, the scenery here is amazing , but the real story is data breach victim notification. Charlotte and I wanted to do this one together today and chat about some of the things we'd been hearing from government and law enforcement on our travels, and the victim notification angle featured heavily. She reminded me of the trouble even the police have when reaching out to organisations about security issues, often being confronted by lawyers or other company representatives worried about legal repr...

On Ousterhout ’ s Dichotomy Oct 6, 2024 Why are there so many programming languages? One of the driving reasons for this is that some languages tend to produce fast code, but are a bit of a pain to use (C++), while others are a breeze to write, but run somewhat slow (Python). Depending on the ratio of CPUs to programmers, one or the other might be relatively more important. But can ’ t we just, like, implement a universal language that is convenient but slowish by default, but ...

I was interviewed on the Book Overflow podcast about the Refactoring book . We talked about the origins of the book, the relationship between refactoring, testing, and extreme programming, how refactoring is used in the wild, and the role of books and long-form prose today. more… I was interviewed on the Book Overflow podcast about the Refactoring book . We talked about the origins of the book, the relationship between refactoring, testing, and ...

How to block network access during weekdays on Windows and Linux. How to block network access during weekdays on Windows and Linux.

The melody of The Sound by Carly Rae Jepsen plays in the background as I write the opening sentence for this blog post. When I hear a song in a playlist that I love, I often take a screenshot of the song name to remind me to listen to the song later. I often forget to go back and look at the songs. This weekend, however, I decided to look through some of the songs and listen to them. One of the songs on the list was The Sound by Carly Rae Jepsen . The keyboardist plays a soft, calming me...

Consider the following problem. You want to iterate through the characters of a strings and find only those matching some criteria. For example, you might want scan an HTML string looking for the characters ‘<‘, ‘&’, ‘\0’, ‘\n’. We might do it in C++ using the find_first_of function. It is a generic function that is meant to work with a wide range of containers. std :: string data = load_file_content ( " data.html " ) ; std :: string_view targets = " <& \r \0 " ; a...

Smolderingly fast b-trees Smolderingly fast b-trees Smolderingly fast b-trees

A new entry in the Uxbridge English Dictionary : polynomial (poly·no·mi·al) Of or with multiple gnomes. #uxbridge english dictionary Enjoyed this? Have thoughts? Drop me an email! comments@moonbase.lgbt A new entry in the Uxbridge English Dictionary : polynomial (poly·no·mi·al) Of or with multiple gnomes. #uxbridge english dictionary Enjoyed this? Have thoughts? Drop me an email! comments@moonbase.lgbt A new entry in the Uxbridge English Dictionary...

If you’ve been using uWSGI as your Python web server, you’ll be interested in this prominent message at the top of the uWSGI project : “Note: The project is in maintenance mode (only bug fixes and updates for new languages apis). Do not expect quick answers on GitHub issues and/or pull requests (sorry for that) A big thanks to all of the users and contributors since 2009.” I stumbled across this when poking around GitHub in the Granian project . In there was a reference from O...